And even the
local leaders were not over-well obeyed. The reckless spirit of personal
independence, especially among the Anglo-Danes, prevented anything like
discipline, or organized movement of masses, and made every battle
degenerate into a confusion of single combats.
But Hereward had learned that art of war, which enabled the Norman to
crush, piecemeal, with inferior numbers, the vast but straggling levies of
the English. His men, mostly outlaws and homeless, kept together by the
pressure from without, and free from local jealousies, resembled rather an
army of professional soldiers than a country _posse comitatus_. And
to the discipline which he instilled into them; to his ability in marching
and manoeuvring troops; to his care for their food and for their
transport, possibly, also, to his training them in that art of fighting on
horseback in which the men of Wessex, if not the Anglo-Danes of the East,
are said to have been quite unskilled,--in short, to all that he had
learned, as a mercenary, under Robert the Frison, and among the highly
civilized warriors of Flanders and Normandy, must be attributed the fact,
that he and his little army defied, for years, the utmost efforts of the
Normans, appearing and disappearing with such strange swiftness, and
conquering against such strange odds, as enshrouded the guerilla captain
in an atmosphere of myth and wonder, only to be accounted for, in the mind
of Normans as well as English, by the supernatural counsels of his
sorceress wife.
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